I'm back (or, A problem with the Greek gods)

It's been a long time... Three months, really, and that's a bit extreme, even for this blog. I suppose an explanation and a new post would be in order (preferably two posts, but I think I might compact it into just one).


Things that have kept me from posting:

• Laptop (power jack short circuiting)
• Laptop (keyboard going out)
• Laptop (overheating)
• Laptop (Internet connection)
• Laptop (charging issues)
• Laptop (not really, this time, just a busy real life)

As you can hopefully tell, I'm somewhat dissatisfied with the condition of my laptop. This is, of course, normal, though recently it's gotten a lot worse. It could really use being repaired, or possibly replaced - but I lean away from the replacement option largely because I've only had this laptop for two and a half years. I had hoped it would last longer. At any rate, I haven't been online much in a while, and thus, no new posts. Also I have somewhat fallen behind with online friends... hopefully they can forgive me.

But today that changes! Today, I'm short on time and I'm really being a little bizarrely crazy as I'm spending valuable time to get a severely off-topic, unexpected and unusual post out. About the ancient Greek gods. ...Yep.


Over the past two weeks or so, I've devoted many hours of my free time trying to solve an ultimately pointless problem I posed for myself (which I used to do all the time - it's almost a favorite pastime of mine). Anyway, a bit of backstory is probably required:

After reading through the Percy Jackson books (somewhat overhyped and some of the mythology was screwed up, but it was still pretty good overall), I became enthralled with the idea that a game might be created to allow an all-encompassing fight between the gods, the titans, and you. There aren't many games out there that are based on the gods of ancient Greece. God of War is one, but it's very linear and you don't really have any choice over what you are. Putting that aside, I decided on a plot (indented for your convenience):

The magics of Tartarus fail by the hands of a traitor, releasing Cronus and the rest of the beasts of the deep, who free the other titans from their various prisons and seek not to take over the world, but to destroy it this time - the ultimate vengeance, utterly destroying everything the gods of Olympus have wrought. Seeing their existence in jeopardy, the gods work together to create a top-secret style being with the purpose of saving their world - the "godspawn". The Godspawn would be capable of taking on any of the powers of the gods, being able to choose between them and train in those which would work best for defeating the titans once more - making the Godspawn far more flexible in combat than the gods themselves.

That was the idea behind it. It would've made for a great game - large, open expanses, and large numbers of enemies coming at you and your allies (you'd have to have an army on your side) all at once. Levels would probably be along the lines of undersea battles, battles in the underworld, and battles on Olympus and the surrounding lands. It would be very much a sandbox game, allowing you to play however you desired. However, this presented an issue: How would the designers make it so that choosing an area to specialize in would be more rewarding than getting a little of everything?

The idea for powers was this: each of the 12 gods (I took out Hera and replaced Demeter with Gaia - both Hera and Demeter weren't much but figureheads, and had no powers) would have 12 different powers - Zeus might have a thunderbolt for one, and the ability to summon wind to blow enemies away. Hades might reanimate corpses or suck the life from a group of enemies. Others, like Athena (goddess of wisdom and warfare) might have powers like "Strategize", allowing you to freeze combat and look around (basically giving you time to think), and also allow you to upgrade certain parts of other powers, such as the radius of other attacks. Upgrading one of Hermes' speed powers might allow you to attack with melee quicker, thus strengthening the powers of Ares. Upgrading the fire powers of Hephaestus would be worthless with (and be impeded by) the powers of water-oriented Poseidon. It would be an interesting system - but to encourage players to "purchase" (with experience points, I would guess) and upgrade powers that benefited each other, you needed to do something different.

I decided that each god would be placed in a circle - a "ring". Purchasing powers from a god would lower the cost of godpowers adjacent in the ring, and raise the experience cost of powers from gods on the opposite side. And thus the problem was born: What would be the best way to arrange the 12 gods I had chosen?

Aphrodite, Apollo, Ares, Artemis, Athena, Dionysus, Gaia, Hades, Hephaestus, Hermes, Poseidon and Zeus were the 12 problematic figures. In the beginning of the two-week-long exercise I posed for myself, I tried arranging them manually, but I was extremely dissatisfied with the results. It was almost impossible to get the gods arranged appropriately - some gods worked well with other gods that were enemies with their friends, leading to impossible triangles and other horrible mathematical phenomena. There was no question about it: I couldn't just guess, I needed to do it mathematically. To complicate things, there are a total of 19,958,400 different ways you can arrange a list of 12 items in a circle, and I wanted to choose only the very best combination out of all of those. I needed to decide exactly what powers each god would have.

By this time I had filled six pages of a notebook with tiny numbers, writing, charts and graphs. It took me four more pages before I had decided what power types each god would have, and which power types each power would be compatible with. It took me another day or two to decide how compatible each of the gods would be with each other - but then I had another problem. Instead of a two-dimensional list, I had a total of twelve dimensions now - 12 gods by 12 gods, instead of a straight list. It was at this point that I realized I needed the help of a computer - I needed to write a program to decide which combination would work the best.

After writing a short springbox-style program somewhat reminiscent of the physics in World of Goo, I put in the data I had collected and let it do its work, expecting all the bouncing and springiness to settle down after a while. I was up to twelve pages of work at this point and was rather hoping it would all be over soon - but unfortunately, it didn't ever stop springing the different gods back and forth in the circle. There was no clear-cut solution. The best I could do would be to see which combination "scored" the highest - which meant I had to rewrite my program. And so I did - to test out every single one of the twenty million combinations. At ten thousand combinations per second, it would take a total of thirty minutes to finish the seemingly innocuous but ultimately monumental task - and this heartened me. I rewrote the thing and let it do its work.

Thirty minutes later, I had my list - and looking at it there was no doubt in my mind that it was accurate. I had solved a seemingly simple problem that had turned into something ridiculously complex - and I felt pretty good about it, I'll admit. At least, I did until my brother Zachary pointed out that I could never make the game without a large team, and thus my work was more or less pointless. But in any case, here are the results:

• Aphrodite
• Hephaestus
• Artemis
• Poseidon
• Gaia
• Zeus
• Hades
• Apollo
• Ares
• Hermes
• Athena
• Dionysus

Gods that are opposite each other (six away) are generally incompatible, while the closer they are, the more compatible their powers are. Everything works well together, minus a few things - Gaia and Zeus have powers that can't work together at all, for example. Even so, there's no way to make everything work better - it's as perfect as it gets. Maybe someday someone will come along and use my work to make a game out of it, but hey - it was fun to figure out. Fourteen completely packed notebook pages after I began, I'm done. And somewhat humorously, my "educated guess" at the beginning of it all has absolutely nothing in common with the final result. For future reference: I really, really suck at guessing.